Yet another response to yet more puerility.

[wemyss]

Comments

[fpb]

I am with you on this. To get rid of legal persons would be to lose one of the most useful and important Roman legal inventions, next to the distinction between public and private. On the other hand, one cannot treat a corporation exactly like a physical person. The notion of free speech, in particular, has a wholly different meaning when it applies to you and me than when it is claimed to apply to entities that can manoeuvre hundreds of millions of dollars in their interests and manage the speech of others.

The difficulty being, of course, to draw lines.

[wemyss]

OS map contour lines, in fact, on a very slippery slope. If for-profit corporations are muzzled, well, there go newspapers and their endorsements; and then the pols go after the unions, and the churches, and various eleemosynary institutions ... we have far more to fear from politicians seizing a public tantrum to shut down enquiry into their expenses and bung than we have from wealthy corporations, who, so long as they have, as they must have, divergent interests, will, from mere self-interest, blow the gaff on rivals for doing what they themselves shd like to do if they cd be assured of not getting caught.

[pcornelius]

But a legal personality, a standing to sue & be sued, cannot make of a contract between men a person in truth (which, indeed, is one of my quarrels with Hobbes). This fictitious personality is limited in nature & extent, so that (as we are well informed) a corporation cannot commit blasphemy or treason, or be excommunicated ; & I deny that it can speak as a real person can, or lay claim in general to civil or human rights, save as they may in some ways be communicated to it by the humans & citizens who are its members, shareholders, or the like.

As copyright & other laws restricting "speech & the press, & the right of the people peaceably to assemble" are extended in the Great Republic, as if in balance, bizarre & improper extensions are made in other directions. It appears that, in addition the right of corporations to support political candidates, we shall soon see admitted the right of anyone who chooses to profess to hold, & wear the symbols of, any military decoration he pleases.

Hard cases make bad law, isn't that the maxim?

[wemyss]

But the principle is I think so important that its capacity for abuse must be tolerated, for the reasons explained supra.